Welders, carpenters, and other people joining workpieces together often have a need to join the workpieces together at particular angles. A welder, for instance, may frequently need to weld two metal workpieces together at specific angles, such as 90-degrees or 45-degrees. However, a single welder cannot simultaneously hold two or more workpieces himself, align the workpieces to a specific angle, and ensure that the alignment does not change during the welding process.
Conventional tools for aligning workpieces, such as carpentry or speed squares, suffer from numerous limitations that reduce or negate their utility. For example, while a speed square may provide a 90-degree angle, a speed square is substantially planar itself and does not provide flat planar edges on which to properly align workpieces. Further, a speed square lacks the ability to hold workpieces, and both the speed square and the workpiece must be manually held to ensure that an alignment does not change. Due to these limitations, a user of a speed square is often subjected to a time-consuming iterative process of aligning two workpieces with the speed square, removing the speed square, attaching the workpieces to one another, realigning the workpieces with the speed square, adjusting the attachment between the workpieces, and so on.
Further, forming an angle with a conventional tool requires direct placement of the tool in a joint forming the angle. For example, a user attempting to join two workpieces to form a 90-degree angle must place a conventional tool at the point of joinder and directly flush with the workpieces. Such a placement of a tool directly obstructs the ability to operate upon a workpiece at the point of joinder. This is particularly troublesome when the operation involves welding, where the welding implements themselves must occupy an amount of space proximate to the workpieces. Additionally, the point of joinder between workpieces does not always correspond to the intersection of the planes to which the workpieces are aligned. For example, two workpieces may be aligned at an angle of 90-degrees with respect to one another, but attached via a third workpiece that forms a chamfered corner. In scenarios such as these where there is not a single point of joinder corresponding to a desired angle, conventional tools utterly fail and cannot accurately align workpieces.
Thus, conventional tools and techniques lack the ability to quickly and accurately align workpieces in various scenarios, lack the ability to ensure that the alignment does not change during an operation upon a workpiece, and obstruct access to the point of joinder of workpieces.